The book version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity begins with an example of a common delusion in our culture: the belief that humans can be divided into different races. I assert that there is only one race, the human race, and that racial divisions exist only in our minds.
This statement has caused some comment among readers of the book. They are convinced that racial categories are based in reality, which just reinforces the point of the book: “insanity” is defined as confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality.
Every culture creates a “consensus reality,” a collective version of reality that its members take for granted. This collective reality is made up of subjective beliefs and assumptions, many of which have no basis in fact, but it’s very hard to see that when you’re a member of the society because to you it’s just “reality.”
When we travel we perceive that other cultures have their own realities, and we call the experience “culture shock.” We look back in history and call an earlier society’s collective reality a myth.
But it’s very hard to question the assumptions of our own culture. As historian Nell Painter, wrote in her 2011 book The History of White People: “What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.”
What basis do I have for questioning our cultural assumption that races exist?
The Human Genome Project established, by analyzing human DNA, that there is no basis for the belief in separate races. Any differences that you can cite, such as skin color or nose shape, are superficial characteristics that have developed because for most of human history people bred with their close neighbors, so regional differences developed. However, these differences are minor compared to our similarities.
At the official Human Genome Project website (part of the U.S. Department of Energy), there is an article in their “Ethics” section on what the findings of the Project mean about race:
A biologist at Washington University analyzed DNA from peoples across the globe. He concluded in a 1998 paper for the journal American Anthropologist, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," that there is no such thing as race. Washington University put out this press release about his article, entitled “Biological Differences Among Races Do Not Exist”:
The American Anthropological Association, in their 1998 Statement on 'Race', makes it very clear that there is no such thing as separate races. This, they say, “represents the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.”
Nell Irvin Painter, professor of American History at Princeton University, asserts in The History of White People that the concept of color defining race is a relatively new invention. Up until about the 1700s, people were defined by their geographic region. Prejudice mostly consisted of “my people are best, other people are inferior.”
A couple of thousand years ago, cultures in the Mediterranean region believed that people from the Caucasus were the most beautiful people in the world. Ironically this meant Caucasians were highly valued as slaves, especially the women who were revered for their pale skin.
It wasn’t until the scientific era, when scientists began chopping everything up into categories, that the idea of separate races, even separate species, of humanity really took hold. And then, of course, it was the group who wrote the science that made up the racial categories. As in war where the victors write the history, so in science. Since this period was the ascent of the English, who were Anglo-Saxon, the race “scientifically” judged to be best were the Anglo-Saxons. The old term for the most attractive people, Caucasian, was then given to this “superior” race.
The American Anthropological Association also asserts in its “Statement on Race” that the British and Americans used the invented concept of race as a justification for their exploitation of “lesser” peoples around the globe. In this country it was a very convenient rationale for African slavery and the genocide of the native American population. The "Statement on Race" includes this passage:
The United States was a WASP country from the beginning, and every other group—be it Catholics, southern Europeans, Jews, Asians, or Latinos—had to fight for acceptance against entrenched “whites are superior” prejudice.
The 2012 election showed that many conservatives believe that the United States should always be a “white” country. They bemoan the fact that Barack Obama was able to win the presidency even though he won a minority of white voters—the first time this has happened in our nation’s history.
On election night Bill O’Reilly said on FOX News:
Whenever conservatives complain about traditional America being lost, what they really mean is this: the “darkies” are taking over from the whites and this means the inevitable decline of our nation.
Surprising to us today, the “white” racial category did not at first include many peoples that we would unthinkingly consider to be white, such as the Irish and French. They, Ms. Painter tells us, were considered to be members of the ignoble Celt race. If you don’t believe me, watch John Stewart instruct Bill O’Reilly in the history of anti-Irish prejudice in this country.
[As an aside, I can’t think of Ms. Painter’s book without also thinking of Martin Mull’s spoof on WASP culture: The History of White People in America.]
American history is filled with sordid stories of people being discriminated against because of spurious racial theories. Slavery and the ongoing discrimination against African-Americans is a well-known national shame.
Less well known is the popularity of eugenics in this country. Eugenics is the attempt to purify the race of a country by eliminating undesirable elements from the breeding population. Developed in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics was a widely accepted “scientific” theory that confirmed the superiority of the ruling elite—that is, WASPs. These theories said that White Anglos-Saxons were rich and powerful because they were racially superior to the darker peoples.
Hitler was influenced in his thinking by the eugenicist movement in this country.
Eugenics led to the forced sterilization of thousands of people judged to be genetically inferior—the only thing that slowed this movement down in this country was the defeat of Hitler. Suddenly eugenics was no longer a popular cause, but sterilizations continued in some states until the 1970s!
Eugenics also influenced which groups were allowed to immigrate to this country. “Inferior” southern Europeans had more difficulty than “superior” northern Europeans, and Asians were considered so undesirable that attempts were made to keep them out of the country entirely. In 1882 immigration from China was completely ended, and in 1917 the immigration-exclusion zone was expanded to include a huge swath of the Earth—from the Middle East to Indonesia.
PBS aired a three-part documentary called “Race: The Power of an Illusion” in 2003. The third part is about the consequences of our society’s racial beliefs, which includes this information about the battle of Asians to be allowed to immigrate:
Clearly, the belief in the reality of races has been deeply ingrained in the belief system of our culture. It is a lie. There are no separate races. There is only the human race. To continue to believe otherwise is to be under the spell of delusion.
This statement has caused some comment among readers of the book. They are convinced that racial categories are based in reality, which just reinforces the point of the book: “insanity” is defined as confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality.
Every culture creates a “consensus reality,” a collective version of reality that its members take for granted. This collective reality is made up of subjective beliefs and assumptions, many of which have no basis in fact, but it’s very hard to see that when you’re a member of the society because to you it’s just “reality.”
When we travel we perceive that other cultures have their own realities, and we call the experience “culture shock.” We look back in history and call an earlier society’s collective reality a myth.
But it’s very hard to question the assumptions of our own culture. As historian Nell Painter, wrote in her 2011 book The History of White People: “What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.”
What basis do I have for questioning our cultural assumption that races exist?
The Human Genome Project established, by analyzing human DNA, that there is no basis for the belief in separate races. Any differences that you can cite, such as skin color or nose shape, are superficial characteristics that have developed because for most of human history people bred with their close neighbors, so regional differences developed. However, these differences are minor compared to our similarities.
At the official Human Genome Project website (part of the U.S. Department of Energy), there is an article in their “Ethics” section on what the findings of the Project mean about race:
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity.
A biologist at Washington University analyzed DNA from peoples across the globe. He concluded in a 1998 paper for the journal American Anthropologist, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," that there is no such thing as race. Washington University put out this press release about his article, entitled “Biological Differences Among Races Do Not Exist”:
Templeton said, “Humans are one of the most genetically homogenous species we know of. There's lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it's basically at the individual level. The between-population variation is very, very minor.”
Among Templeton's conclusions: There is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that “racial traits” are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations.
The American Anthropological Association, in their 1998 Statement on 'Race', makes it very clear that there is no such thing as separate races. This, they say, “represents the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.”
In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.
Nell Irvin Painter, professor of American History at Princeton University, asserts in The History of White People that the concept of color defining race is a relatively new invention. Up until about the 1700s, people were defined by their geographic region. Prejudice mostly consisted of “my people are best, other people are inferior.”
A couple of thousand years ago, cultures in the Mediterranean region believed that people from the Caucasus were the most beautiful people in the world. Ironically this meant Caucasians were highly valued as slaves, especially the women who were revered for their pale skin.
It wasn’t until the scientific era, when scientists began chopping everything up into categories, that the idea of separate races, even separate species, of humanity really took hold. And then, of course, it was the group who wrote the science that made up the racial categories. As in war where the victors write the history, so in science. Since this period was the ascent of the English, who were Anglo-Saxon, the race “scientifically” judged to be best were the Anglo-Saxons. The old term for the most attractive people, Caucasian, was then given to this “superior” race.
The American Anthropological Association also asserts in its “Statement on Race” that the British and Americans used the invented concept of race as a justification for their exploitation of “lesser” peoples around the globe. In this country it was a very convenient rationale for African slavery and the genocide of the native American population. The "Statement on Race" includes this passage:
Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
The United States was a WASP country from the beginning, and every other group—be it Catholics, southern Europeans, Jews, Asians, or Latinos—had to fight for acceptance against entrenched “whites are superior” prejudice.
The 2012 election showed that many conservatives believe that the United States should always be a “white” country. They bemoan the fact that Barack Obama was able to win the presidency even though he won a minority of white voters—the first time this has happened in our nation’s history.
On election night Bill O’Reilly said on FOX News:
“Obama wins because it’s not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things.”
Whenever conservatives complain about traditional America being lost, what they really mean is this: the “darkies” are taking over from the whites and this means the inevitable decline of our nation.
Surprising to us today, the “white” racial category did not at first include many peoples that we would unthinkingly consider to be white, such as the Irish and French. They, Ms. Painter tells us, were considered to be members of the ignoble Celt race. If you don’t believe me, watch John Stewart instruct Bill O’Reilly in the history of anti-Irish prejudice in this country.
[As an aside, I can’t think of Ms. Painter’s book without also thinking of Martin Mull’s spoof on WASP culture: The History of White People in America.]
American history is filled with sordid stories of people being discriminated against because of spurious racial theories. Slavery and the ongoing discrimination against African-Americans is a well-known national shame.
Less well known is the popularity of eugenics in this country. Eugenics is the attempt to purify the race of a country by eliminating undesirable elements from the breeding population. Developed in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics was a widely accepted “scientific” theory that confirmed the superiority of the ruling elite—that is, WASPs. These theories said that White Anglos-Saxons were rich and powerful because they were racially superior to the darker peoples.
Hitler was influenced in his thinking by the eugenicist movement in this country.
Eugenics led to the forced sterilization of thousands of people judged to be genetically inferior—the only thing that slowed this movement down in this country was the defeat of Hitler. Suddenly eugenics was no longer a popular cause, but sterilizations continued in some states until the 1970s!
Eugenics also influenced which groups were allowed to immigrate to this country. “Inferior” southern Europeans had more difficulty than “superior” northern Europeans, and Asians were considered so undesirable that attempts were made to keep them out of the country entirely. In 1882 immigration from China was completely ended, and in 1917 the immigration-exclusion zone was expanded to include a huge swath of the Earth—from the Middle East to Indonesia.
PBS aired a three-part documentary called “Race: The Power of an Illusion” in 2003. The third part is about the consequences of our society’s racial beliefs, which includes this information about the battle of Asians to be allowed to immigrate:
The 1790 Naturalization Act had limited naturalized citizenship to “free, white persons.” In 1915, Takeo Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had attended the University of California, appealed the rejection of his citizenship application. He argued that his skin was as white as any “white” person. But he also argued that race shouldn’t matter - what mattered most was one's beliefs. The Supreme Court ruled against him, saying that Ozawa may be white but he was not Caucasian, and according to scientific evidence only Caucasians could be white people.
Several months later, Bhagat Singh Thind, a South Asian immigrant and U.S. Army veteran, argued that he should be granted citizenship since scientists classified Indians as Caucasians. The Court, refuting its own reasoning in Ozawa said Thind may well be Caucasian but he wasn’t “white.” Petition denied.
Clearly, the belief in the reality of races has been deeply ingrained in the belief system of our culture. It is a lie. There are no separate races. There is only the human race. To continue to believe otherwise is to be under the spell of delusion.
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